How walkable is your neighborhood?
I recently discovered (sadly, I don’t remember how) WalkScore.com, where you can enter your (or any) address and have a “walkability” score calculated for your neighborhood. They use Google Maps to find out how far it is to a long list of important services and amenities (grocery stores, libraries, schools, coffee shops, and the like), and you get points based on how close you are. There are some issues (and they’re very up front about them) with using straight line distance as a proxy for walkability, but it’s not a bad approximation and a good start. There’s also no way they can take into account your preferences for things like schools and restaurants; you’d get points for living next door to a McDonald’s, for example, even if you’d prefer to go a little farther to the nifty local burrito joint.
Our house here in Morris scores a 54 out of a 100, which is probably about as good as you’ll get outside of a dense urban area (the Sears Tower in Chicago scores a whopping 94, for example). Personally, I think Morris is about as walkable/bikable a place as one is likely to ever find: Flat, reasonably compact, and with good roads and (mostly) sidewalks. It’s clear that Google Maps is confused about some of the businesses here in Morris as some of their distances are broken and they don’t know that we have a coffee shop a few blocks away (they list one nearly 25 miles distant!).
In total, it’s a cool idea, and I wish that it was available in the UK as we’re preparing to spend a year in Colchester without a car, and it would be nice to have a similar service while we look at houses and flats.
For amusement check out the scores of Bill Gates’s home and Shrub’s ranch in Crawford. Real environmentalists, these guys :-).
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August 1st, 2007 at 10:50
I actually wrote to the chamber of commerce and passed them the link to google’s update page, urging them to ask local businesses to add/verify their entries. Google has made it easy to do, but I think most people just don’t know about it.
August 1st, 2007 at 10:51
Oh, and you might have found the walkscore link on Pharyngula…
August 1st, 2007 at 22:04
I’m really glad that you poked the Chamber on this. There are obviously a lot of simple corrections that could/should be made, and I suspect that you’re right about people just not knowing about it.
I didn’t catch the link on Pharyngula, although I’m thrilled that you posted about it. The tab had been sitting there in Firefox for over a week until I actually wrote that post a few days ago. (I time delayed it out because I knew I wouldn’t be posting much (if any) this week.) No idea where I saw it, though…